My mother got the Blue Screen of Death to END all Blue Screens of Death today-- it said there was a problem with the computer and it required her-- required her-- to reformat. It kept shutting off and turning back on, etc... so she reformatted.

And everything is gone.

I know the answer's probably no, but... is there any way to retrieve that data? We didn't buy an external hard drive, though you better believe I'm gonna do it now.

There are programs you can use to try and retrieve the data, yes. Can't think of a name of one at the moment, but there are definitely free ones out there. Do a search for recover deleted files or something like that. Usually it's a program you can put on a boot floppy or CD that can see what's there. Some let you just restore the file, but it would be best to have a second drive in the system to copy the stuff over to.